


Mother Daughter Storytime

by Twilit



Series: The Gospel Bright and Tenebrous [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eldritch Horror AU, F/F, Gen, Supernatural AU - Freeform, tw: body horror, tw: bullying, tw: gore, tw: purging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-24
Updated: 2013-05-24
Packaged: 2017-12-12 20:28:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/815709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twilit/pseuds/Twilit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something grows within the Lalondes, something beyond the ken of men and women.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mother

Your name is Dr. Roxanne Lalonde and there is something growing inside you.

It's a pretty sad statement of your life that the cold, clinical room feels comfortable, like a second home. For Roxy Lalonde, brilliant astrophysicist and xenobiologist, you guess it's ok to feel that way, since you've spent more than fifty percent of your time since you were sixteen in some kind of lab or another. It certainly helps ease you when you're on your back, stomach smeared with jelly and an ice-cold sonogram head pressed to your skin.

"Jesus Christ, don't you guys, like, warm those things up these days?"

"Well we would, except you're in here for free, behind the backs of the doctors and it's SIX O'CLOCK IN THE FUCKING MORNING."

"Haha yeah, fair 'nuff, I'll shut up now."

"Thank fucking Christ." Nurse Vantas adjusts some dials and presently the screen resolves in the blue and white static of a sonogram. "Right, gimme a second..."

With a delicate touch that belies his rough features, he shifts the head about gently, bringing into view something that writhes like grasping pseudopodia.

The two of you blink as a tiny humanoid shape slowly resolves. You're both silent a moment longer, either out of fading shock or uncertainty, before Vantas manages,

"Congratu-fucking-lations. Your impending shitmonster is a girl."

You crack a smile, "A girl? You're sure."

"Well I'm not a fucking doctor, but the lack of a dangly bit is pretty telling at this stage. Lemme try to get another angle."

The head, now quite warm from the heat of your body, moves and the sonogram image dissolves but not before some undulating thing teases your vision. A sense of unease spreads from the head, like butterflies in your stomach, but less overt, and more troublingly suppressed.

"Yeah, ok, more sure now. It's female." His choice of words sends shivers down your spine. "Great. Exactly what the world needs; another fucking Lalonde making unwanted passes at anything with an ass."

"But it's such a nice ass, KK." You bat your eyelashes at him and he throws a towel at you.

"Fuck off and wipe down. I wanna be outta here long before the first egghead gets in."

You do so and heave your increasing bulk off the examination table. For all his grouchiness, Vantas is there to lend an arm. You're grateful for it as you reconsider, not for the first time, the wisdom of keeping the kid.

\-- 

You have to admit, it was a pretty stupid fling. Some visiting psychologist, here for some conference or another. He was charming enough, in a vaguely creepy, European way. But he rose to the occasion well enough when you cracked about his shiny cue ball head, even if he was surprised at your doctorate(s) and the fact that you were about to literally drink him under the table.  
Hardly the most flattering of descriptions, but accurate enough. Still, nothing went awry.  
But even that deep into his cups he was charming and attractive and so you took him home. And so, weeks later, you were heaving your guts out and wondering who to sue, the birth control company or the condom company.

Your colleagues, all older than you, thought that you were crazy for keeping it. All "Don't you have enough on your plate, Roxy?" "Just think about what it's going to do to your career!" And they were right, or close enough. You were hella busy, always looking for more to occupy you, to distract your racing mind. It's why there were more letters after your surname than in most others’ first names. It's why you sat on three different boards of directors. It's why you drank, and smoked and fucked. You were a brilliant hurricane bound up into the body of a twenty-six year old who didn't know what she was looking for. 

Somewhere in there you got sick of calling the child "it" and called in a favour from Vantas. 

You thought, maybe, you were looking for the family you never had.

\--

You wonder if the kid kicking and shifting is supposed to feel like a barrel of eels.

\--

The grump is on staff when you go into labour, and you make sure that he's on the team that attends you. You do this by literally twisting the doctor's arm around with a half-remembered bit of jiu-jitsu and screaming that if Vantas doesn't get his goddamn ass in here you are going to start breaking heads. Soon enough he's telling you to shut the fuck up and breathe like how you learned, goddammit.  
It's an agonizing twelve hours of pushing a basketball down a garden hose and it's enough to distract you from worries of mutated babies with tentacles for arms. You have climbed the Alps, cracked theories about black holes, and gotten grants from the government and this is by far the hardest thing you've ever done. 

But when the doctor wearily announces that she's out, you've got a beautiful baby girl your heart almost stops. There's no crying. Why isn't there any crying? The doctor smiles reassuringly and hands you a gurgling baby girl,

_\- limp and bloody tentacle burst from her stomach_ that's the umbilical cord, idiot _testament to unnatural birth -_

breathing fine and not making a peep. Your panicked face must have communicated something to him, because he shrugs and says exhaustedly,

"Happens sometimes. I've never seen it before, but I know a few colleagues who have delivered babies that don't cry. Don't worry, it probably doesn't mean anything. Let's have her here so we can do a quick run of tests."

For a small eternity, there's only you and your child, the world gone warm and fuzzy with the aftereffects of birth and more drugs than you've ever taken at once. Vantas takes her from you and wouldn't you know it, that's when she bursts out screaming and crying. He rolls his eyes and she opens hers. For a moment, you consider naming her Violet, but you doubt Rose would ever forgive you for it.

\--

You take maternity leave to enjoy ten months with your newborn in the Catskills, housed in the mansion thousands of patents paid for. It was meant to be a home away from home, but now you are determined to turn it into a home proper, with some laboratories on the side.

You nurse and coo over Rose as contractors assemble an observatory, a biohazard facility and a testing facility the military had to be bribed to overlook. For once in your life, your brain isn't haring off on some wild algorithmic chase because there's your dear child, anchoring you with love and worry. That's not to say you don't take her with you into the labs, show her the infinite vastness of space or the complexities of life, all more than she could possibly understand.

But you like to think it had something to do with her precociousness.

\--

The first time she burps black tar, rank with the smell of decay, on your shoulder and down your back, you stare at her in horror as her eyes film over with a milky white sclera like a washed up fish. You rush her to the hospital. Your heart is in your mouth and the only thing that keeps you from violating a thousand and one road laws is the knowledge that you could kill your Rose doing so.

But when you get there, she's giggling and healthy as can be and your labcoat is spotless, save for a mild brownish discoloration, the sticky stuff long since evaporated.

\--

At nine months, she saysher first words, before she can even walk. From a playpen in Lab 6 she extends her arms toward you as you come out of decontamination and exclaims,

"Mama!"

The squeal out of your mouth is more girlish than you've been in years, but you don't care, sweeping her up in your arms and bouncing her happily. You nuzzle her face, tell her how proud you are of her and laugh lightly. She laughs and burbles with you, sharing in your happiness and pride. Then she extends her hands over your shoulder and says, with that same joy and familiarity,

"Dada!"

When you spin around, there's nothing there, and Rose is crying from how hard you're clutching her to you.

\--

That's about when you pick up the bottle again. Just to settle your nerves, you know.

\--

You suppose it's partially your fault when she finds the kitten. And partially the kitten's fault, considering the damn thing managed to haul it's mutated carcass up to the window and headbutt the pane repeatedly until someone came to investigate. That someone was Rose and when you'd finally gotten around to investigating the sounds yourself, you found her trying to push open the window herself.  
Of course you do away with that silly idea and pick her up off the sill, placing her safely on the ground before opening the window to let the poor thing in. It looks badly mauled, eyes barely open and so thin you could see ribs, its stomach concave. You were already thinking of how to get it back up to weight before Rose started begging you if she could keep it, please oh please.

After a nutritional formula in a bowl of milk, the thing opens its eyes and you're looking at four of them. And well, that's certainly not a naturally occurring mutation and you guiltily think about the effects of some of the more exotic radiation you're working with.

It doesn't bother you that your daughter's best friend is a mutated cat until years later. Years later when you've conclusively proven that none of your machines could produce radiation to induce mutation in living creatures. And then it's quite inseparable from her, curled up on or about her, purring contentedly. So it's really no harm, is it?

\--

Her teachers in kindergarten have concerns.

"How does she even know what abyssal means?"

You give her a look. "I have 4 PhDs that took me as long as it takes most people to get through their honours. I THINK my kid might be as smart as I am."

"She has imaginary friends."

"So does every other brat at this age! Lindsy is off playing with whassisname now!" You gesture at the girl pouring tea for an invisible guest over a table she built from blocks.

"Mister Flopsy isn't called Nehrubyegleth." 

"Nrub'yiglith," you correct off-handedly. They stare at you. You try to stare back defiantly, to take your daughter's side, but you have to admit her choice of names is disturbing. You wondered once if you'd left Lovecraft lying around somehow, but you can't remember the last time you saw your copy of the Complete Works.

"She's scaring the other children!"

"Well the other children can learn to suck it up then!"

Three weeks later they ask you to collect Rose early. She's made the children cry. Your darling Rosie looks sullen and a little bit scared. She also looks like she's been crying. The teachers don't answer your questions and nearly push her out the door at you before shutting it behind her. Bastards. Turning out a three year old girl. You gather up your baby and try to soothe her, to say nothing of yourself.

"Honey, what happened?"

"Billy stole my book and wouldn't give it back."

"Oh. Why were the other kids crying then?"

Rose looks unhappy, a little bit guilty. "I hit him until he gave it back."

Despite yourself you feel flush of pride. Then you see strange red circles around her wrist and your temper flares. "Did he hit you, too?"

Rose sees you looking at her wrist and tries to hide it. "No, he just cried."

Now at the car, you buckle Rose in and try to think of what to say next. "You know you shouldn't fight with the other kids, Rose. Especially if you're so good at beating them up."  
You flash her a little smile. She brightens a little. 

"I'm not real good. " she admits. "Nrub'yiglith helped, and held my hand when I got scared."

\--

It's like that, or close enough, at most kindergartens, so you end up homeschooling her. It's easy as hell, because she's as bright as you and even though you're a crappy enough teacher, she's a great reader. She makes a hash of the state curriculum, so you let her study what she wants most of the time. So long as she passes the tests with a good mark, she can read whatever she likes, you tell her firmly. And if she's a bit wobbly on her math the first time, she quickly improves as your math lessons eat into her reading time.

And if you, from time to time, dream of Rose's episodes of scaring the children, you don't remember them when you wake up. They should be nightmares, jolting you awake, but from your perspective, from Rose's perspective, you're just confused why the other kids don't want to play with the things in the shadows. Comfortable tangled masses that pet you like you were theirs and rumble with seething laughter when you pout. It’s just like having more mommies and daddies. But the kids cry and run away from you.

She's seven, going on eight, when you pick up the bottle for real.

\--

She asked you for a journal ages ago, you can’t rightly remember when. Apparently the notebooks weren’t good enough so you supplied it happily. She got a bright pink leather-bound little tome of her own and she was soon filling it up when she wasn’t reading or writing or chatting on the internet.

You were getting back to writing of your own, academic journals long neglected. The past several years had been fruitful for research, but now it was time to put it all together and start wowing the community again. It’s a shame you still suck at the writing part, but long hours of grinding it out get you there.

The sun’s gone down when you stumble out of the lab, laptop under your arm. You don’t bother with the lights, you know the way to your room by heart. So it’s a shock when you nearly trip over Rose in the darkened living room, before your eyes have the chance to adjust. 

“Jeez kiddo, think you could turn on the light?”

“I can see fine, Mom.”

You peer down at her. Now as the dark turns to something visible, you can see her scribbling away in the notebook. You look up at the huge french windows. Sure, there’s a moon out, but no kid should be straining their eyes in this light. Hell, you can’t even see what she’s writing and you’re leaning right over her.

Looking closer, your eyes grow wide as you take in the hideous, crawling scratching that 

_\- mar the page like the lifeblood of abyssal creatures dripped from a quill made of the ovipositor of a deformed alavaraphidia -_

mark the pages in the moonlight. Then Rose looks up at you, eyes huge, glossy, and insectile black and you leap away shrieking.

\--

The vodka burns as it goes down, but the silky pain of it is nearly enough to blot out the memory of Rose crying, running to her room after you flipped on the lights. Three chugs in, you cough, the liquid running out over your lips and down your front. You get the vermouth and mix a martini that you drink out of the shaker and in inadvisable quantities. The world goes fuzzy and you realise it’s tears blurring your eyes, not the vodka.

The tears blurred her eyes, but not enough for you not to notice her lovely violet irises.

\--

That was when the passive-aggressiveness started, when you tried to apologize the next morning with pancakes and fresh maple syrup. But even as she thanked you profusely, in flowery language kids twice her age didn’t use, you could see the betrayal in her eyes. That terrible knowledge of children who discover that their parents are flawed creatures, with real fears and problems.

And certainly, many mothers hid from their problems in the bottle, tragic as that may be. But most mothers didn’t fear what lurked inside their very own child. So Rose’s warm attitude towards you became a frosty veneer of eagerness to please and loving care, while yours became a drunken parody of a perfect mother and scientist. You wonder miserably, at your most sober, when you started giving half-realized fears more importance than love for your daughter. 

You try to reach back out for her, but you still brace your attempts with drink and come out all the more stumbling and false for it.

\--

Every mother fears her little girl going to high school, and you would have avoided it if you could. But you’d been re-hired at the university after you applied to get access to better equipment. You didn’t have enough time to teach Rose and look into the research that you were losing yourself in. So eventually you let your little girl, grown older and paler, out into the world. You didn’t worry for her education. You worried that she wouldn’t make friends with someone other than a black stray cat. In the days before her first day of school, it's curled about the shoulders of your daughter, four pairs of feline eyes staring at you while the promise of countless shifting black-lipped mouths seemed to lurk under the midnight-black fur. 

You’re worried about what the other kids will think of her, but not for any reasons that could be called sane.

\--

It goes on fine for years, Rose coming home telling you about her day in that chillingly pleasant tone that tells you everything she says is a lie, an exaggeration or just what you want to hear. Her teachers are impressed and none too worried at her anti-social behaviour (“it’s just a phase, she’ll get through it”). Their words make you doubt your own sanity even more. All kids go through crap like this, right? Your daughter’s still perfectly normal, just a bit smarter, more distant than others. Thoughts like these eat away at the back of your mind even as you allow their assurances to ease your most obvious worry as you dive deeper into your work, distancing yourself from Rose even as you begin drinking less and less. You're not sure if she even notices, as she doesn't interact with you unless you initiate. But so long as everything's fine with her, you're fine too, you tell yourself. 

She even makes some friends and has them over a few times. And when catch her with a girlfriend on the couch, you think you might have overdone your approval with the “coming out” gift. And if she’s just a bit more, ok a lot more, tight-lipped, that’s fine too.

Years pass, and it’s all fine, you think, until one night something comes in from the darkness.


	2. Daughter

Your name is Rose Lalonde and there is something growing inside you.

You’ve known this since you were a child, but back then you were sure it was just part of growing up. And your... friends assured you that you were completely correct and that there was nothing to be afraid of. Then you got your hands on a biology textbook and started putting things together on your own. But even then, you were not really afraid. Confused, certainly. But not afraid. The friends that you made on the internet were equally confused by your descriptions of cold things shifting, not painfully, inside of you. But they just brushed them off and made fun of what you said you could do in the dark, at night, and in places no one could see you. So perhaps fear did not have a chance to grow, when anger was there to supplant it.

Then came your pre-teen years, when you’d completely outstripped the textbooks and young adult novels that your mother bought you. For the most part they were trashy, appropriate to your age but not your development. But some of them were really rather engaging and seeing the rate at which you ate through them, your mother kept buying them. You accepted them with mock gratitude and passive-aggressive fawning, giving her an embossed thank-you card for each one. Slipped somewhere she could notice, of course. Like under her martini glass. Or the bottle.

You found it when you were eleven. Or rather, you felt your shadow glide over it in the attic that you had decided to turn into a reading room/library. Picking up the dusty old tome and brushing the accumulations of a decade off it, you read _The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft._ Thirty-six hours later, there may have been a little flicker of fear but if someone had looked into your tired, skull-sunken eyes, they would have been hard pressed to find it. Hunched over the book, you looked ravenous and eager, with your shadow flickering in light that wasn’t there. But afraid?

No. No, that would come later.

\--

Fear is something more appropriate to the classroom. Intellectually, you knew what to expect. But a lifetime of being nurtured at home skewed your ability to deal with your peers, let alone large groups of them. So your first couple of days were spent hunched over, barrelling through crowds, and rejecting any overtures of friendship. Soon enough, you developed the reputation for being unapproachable, which would have suited you well enough, if that it did not also mean you were a prime target for hormone-ridden teenage girls, too witless to see that their attempts at enforcing a heirarchy based on appearance and social ties was only casting them as collaborators in a patriarchy bent on oppressing them (read: bullies).

You also discover that you babble when put in positions that you are not comfortable with. After hearing the above mumbled rant, one sterling example of the type by the name of Tessa replied primly,

“But _my_ daddy loves me.” As if that had anything to do with what you had just blurted.

“Of course he does,” you answer. And that would probably have gotten you off with little issue had you not followed with, “frequently.”

\--

Your frequent clashes with Tessa and her party begin to wear you down, even as they raise you to something like infamy in the school. They make fun of every aspect of your appearance, call you ridiculous things like dyke, freak, and bulimic (which you aren’t quite sure if they understand the meaning of, because honestly, you show no indication of).

You find yourself dressing darker and darker, perhaps in some teenage fit of rebellion, of counter-culture. Or perhaps just to become more and more anonymous, because you really don’t want to deal with this bullshit. At this point, young as you are, you just want out of this hellhole and get on with life. You resent your mother all the more that you have to slow your development with this nonsense.

Your efforts have little success, only labelling you that much more a freak in the eyes of the teenage establishment. They do have the unexpected side effect of attracting the attention of one of its subsets: goths. Goths and Kanaya Maryam.

\--

Kanaya and her friends seem to enjoy your quieter mien and you quickly associate yourself with them. It’s quite therapeutic, being friends with them, even as they play at dark majicks and vampire games in fun. The gray pallor you were beginning to pick up fades among them, ironically enough.

It’s Kanaya who jokes that this simply won’t do, to have such a wonderfully pale complexion and not make the most of it. You blush mildly and protest that you have little interest in your appearance, but let her have her way with a makeover, a la goth. 

So one day after school, upstairs in her house, in a room festooned with black lace and scarlet faux satin, Kanaya Maryam works her magic on you. You are stuffed into corsetry neither of you would ever wear to school, placed on a stool while the other girl brings a variety of instruments to bear on your face. You suppress a moment of panic at the thought of anyone bringing something so bristled near your eyes and stare off into the shadowed corners of the room. As the barbed tool works at your eye, you focus on your breathing, the in-and-out, the ebb and flow. And presently, the world seems to swim and the shadows join in the tide of your breath, leaking past their borders and curling towards you. It is strangely 

_\- erotic. Low coils of shadow twine their way up your leg and hers, pulling living vessel and decomposing corpse into that morbid embrace of cold ardour and -_

comforting. Still, you shudder at the closeness of another and other things besides.

“There,” Kanaya says some time later, putting away some other instrument of appearance. She turns you on the small stool to face her vanity and you suck in a gasp.

“Oh, wow.”

Kanaya’s chuckle is a soft thing, far lower than it has any right to be. “Have I reduced Miss Lalonde to a state of inarticulateness?”

Your blonde hair is the only colour to be seen in an otherwise stark visage. Your skin has the appearance of marble, thanks to delicate application of makeup, not caked on. Black lips are currently parted in shock and black-rimmed eyes widened similarly with lashes that flutter delicately. Ah, but wait, you have lied. Your irises, normally a shade of blue close to violet are now a deep abyss of amethyst. The effect is eerie, lending your whole appearance a touch of the ethereal. A cold statue with gems for eyes, marble enfleshed.

Your lips curl into a smile. You like how it makes you feel, like a thing apart, disassociated from the world. You stand, letting the lent dress flow up out of its dark pool with you. You turn to Kanaya and take both her hands. They are warm, so warm and you squeeze them to reassure her, to ease the apprehension on her face.

“I love it.”

\--

It is of course Kanaya who awakens you to the joys and pitfalls of hormones and _feelings_. Unlike other girls, you have little issue with your preference, having long since determined and been assured by your mother that there is nothing wrong or immoral about it. 

Unlike other girls, you have other issues.

You writhe beneath your sheets one night, two fingers deep in yourself, tweaking your clit with your free hand. There’s a lovely tightening in your abdomen, a flare of sweet heat and you crook your fingers, looking for the exact spot to- 

With a tiny, whispered cry of “Kanayaaa~” your orgasm hits, your legs spasm together and a gush of thick liquid rushes past your fingers. _Oh shit_ you think, dimly, behind the fireworks of your eyelids. You’d never come that hard before and wonder, with a curling smile, if the object of your fantasy was the reason for it. You give yourself a few moments for your breathing to calm, for you to collect yourself, and then get up. You turn on a light to strip the bed and promptly shriek.

Your bedspread is damp and covered with dozens of what look for all the world like clear, glistening fish eggs. 

A confused whimper leaves your lips and you feel like vomiting. You clutch at your abdomen, almost clawing at it, dragging burning red marks across it. You want to deny that the spawn of roe could have come from you, you want to deny everything, but the room slowly starts to smell of fish and you have to fight down the bile. You feel like

_\- a living vessel, a host, she who will birth unto the world the Dark Gift, torn apart with the trauma of our ascension -_

a monster, a freak, _inhuman_.

You’re not washing these sheets, you’re _burning_ them and the foul secretions with them. The idea of that slurry coming from you is _vile_ and you don’t want to think of it a moment longer. But your rational mind is taking over. You could not hide a fire from your mother. Washing, yes, possibly. But not a fire.

Resolved, you take one last disgusted look at the filth and then bundle it up. Hauling it to the washer in the basement, you empty the makeshift sack into the vat-sized sink, looking away as the reeking mass splashes into its grave. You try not to look as several pop with a sound of saliva forced through clenched teeth and try not to see unnamable things squirm their death throes. The idea of tiny embryos growing inside you, like some aberrant pregnancy revolts you to the point of nausea. The sheets go in the wash. You empty a jug of bleach into the sink for good measure, then see to your own cleansing.

The water of your shower can’t seem to get hot enough, though you’re scalded bright red from your waist down. You wish for a douche, but instead jam the shower head right at your entrance, heat and pressure turned all the way up. Biting down on a scream, you welcome the scouring heat as it rushes into you. Your eyes, clenched shut, stream tears down your face and join with the sweat born of your pain. You wash yourself roughly, uncaring of the pain.

You stay like that until you can’t cry anymore, your legs are too sore and your cunt thoroughly abraded.

\--

A trip to the doctors discovers nothing wrong. Your mother smothers you with concern and affection though.

\--

Some of Kanaya’s friends play Dungeons and Dragons, and it’s with some condescending amusement that you agree to play a game, if only to get your mind off the state of your life. But only if Kanaya joins as well. She puts up much less of a fight than you’d hoped and so you join the game as Zazzerpan the Learned. 

You find yourself quite impressed with the roleplaying capabilities of Vriska and Terezi, less so of Eridan and Sollux, who seem more interested in squabbling and rolling dice than telling any sort of story. But it’s still quite fun, and even Kanaya seems to enjoy herself with her vampire. You tease her about enjoying such a stereotypical trope, but she defends it as all in good fun, as if you didn’t know she had stacks of bad romance lit back home.

By the end of it, the table has broken into a giggling chortling mass due to hilarity involving a bag of cats, too much hay and the effects of spells gone terribly wrong. You all solemnly swear never to mention the Incident again. You and Kanaya are still giggling when you head home, and you almost don’t notice how you’ve been leaning into her all night. It takes a soft arm around your waist to alert you to it, and that she doesn’t mind at all.

You blush lightly as she walks you home.

\--

Your mother finds out about Zazzerpan because you left your character sheet lying in the front room and suddenly the house is festooned with wizards.

You want to scream. Instead, you fill a few new pages in your journal in your shorthand, scrawling out your frustrations in a rush of ink and scratching.

\--

Your bangs hang over your eyes as something just left of your stomach heaves and your throat is filled with the roiling, brinishly acrid liquid. It burns, it burns and pushes its way up your throat, the pressure against your larynx sending bright shocks of fear through your body. Your eyes tear up before you heave the mass into the porcelain bowl of the stall. The sound of its expulsion is a deep-chested horking gurgle that echoes dully in the washroom and when it hits the water it sounds more like a solid. Opening your stinging eyes you realize that observation is actually quite right. A black, oily substance bobs in the bowl, slowly coming apart like so much viscera. While a part of your mind regards it with morbid curiosity, the sight of it is enough to cause your abdomen to tighten once again and you brace yourself against the stall. The surge comes again, less urgent and this time more liquid. You fill the bowl with oil, gagging all the while. It gets into your nose and you flail for toilet paper while whimpering at the fresh burning.

The flood of oil eases to a weak ink eventually and you’re left panting weakly, looking down into a bowl that looks like a prop from an Aliens film. Your breathing steadies eventually and you reach for more toilet paper to wipe your mouth with until you hear the door. You freeze at the footsteps and quiet, familiar muttering. The stall next to you slams and there’s a moment of shuffling before you hear quick, controlled gagging, followed by the now familiar sound of vomiting. After another string of muttered curses, you recognize the voice.

Even as another wave of black bile threatens to gurgle out your throat, you pad silently out of your stall. For a moment, you wonder what it is you think you’re doing,

_\- wrap a palp ‘round her neck, squeeze until the head pops off, drink the blood, suck the marrow, defile her corpse-_

before you lift a single quarter from your pocket. Silently, you slip it into the groove on the other side of the lock and wait for another _hurk_. When it comes, you apply pressure and give it a quick twist, turning the lock. The hinge gives a terrible creak, but even as she spins you step in and get a clawed grip on Tessa’s hair. She gives a terrified shriek, wincing and grabbing at her hair.

Through gritted teeth, “You know, I should be castigating myself for my failure to realize sooner: your constant taunting and bullying is a projection of your own disorders, likely fueled by your own self-loathing and fears of being discovered.”

“Let go of me, you _freak_!” She hisses and opens teary eyes. “I’ll fucking-”

Her eyes go wide when she looks at you and belatedly you feel the liquid seep between the cracks in your teeth, black bile dribbling over black lips. She cowers from you and it’s far too easy to grin wickedly with your teeth already gritted. You haul her from the stall.

“Since you’re obviously the more experienced one, may I ask your advice? I have just begun purging, myself, and I was wondering if this was normal?”

You thrust her head at the bowl you’ve soiled and she whimpers. The solid ball still bobs in the slick pool of oil, except it seems to have... flowered almost. Tiny little worms seem to writhe across its and other unnamable things slip deeper into the ooze, as if fleeing the air.

“Oh god,” she whimpers and half collapses. When you let go of her hair, she falls towards the bowl and backpedals, terrified. Tessa only stops when she’s backed up against your legs and then she gives another small shriek.

“Nothing? A pity.” You loom over her, and grip her by the crown of her head and her jaw. “Now, I suppose were you in my position, you’d make me swear oaths not to tell anyone about what I’d seen on pain of revealing my own filthy habits. Alas, I’m not that forgiving.”

You tilt her head back painfully and she gasps. A droplet of the oil lands on her forehead and her mouth opens to scream, but you shut it for her. A strangled cry is all she manages.

“Oh, I will proceed and reveal your bulimic tendencies, have no doubt of that.” Your grip tightens on skull, your nails digging into her skin. “And following that, I will lay such a curse on your life that your every day will be an existential agony, every waking hour will cause you to question your sanity and every night you will only see this.”  
Oh how lovely and vicious the ladies Lalonde are. Eyes like amethysts and hearts as hard.  
You thrust her head closer to the bowl and because you can no longer hold back, expelling what you hope is the last of the substance. Tessa squirms in your grasp and cries when a little bit gets on her front. There’s a smell unlike the filth you’ve been tossing up and you note with some amusement and disgust the precious little thing has pissed herself. At the site of the bubbling tar or your little performance, you can’t tell. You remove the roll of toilet paper from the holder, use some to wipe your mouth, and then drop the rest of the roll on her lap.

“Au revoir, Ms. Sawyer.”

\--

Five minutes later, you’re in another washroom in the school curled up in a ball, hyperventilating and wonder where the _fuck_ all that came from and why it felt so good. 

\--

Another trip to the doctors discovers, again, nothing wrong. You resolves to stop going, as you are becoming annoyed with your mother’s attention and, to be perfectly honest, your own passive-aggressive responses.

You go back to writing in your journal and fill it to the end. Mildly surprised, and a little bit proud, you flip back to the beginning to look back on the past, as a sort of therapeutic exercise. 

The first page begins,

_O Herald ours, Vessel of the Noble Circ-_

Slamming the book shut, you scrabble out of your seat, onto the floor away from the table. _I did not write that!_ you think, eyes wide with panic at the violation of your written thoughts. Creeping back to your desk, you open the book from the back to try and see when your journal was replaced with this thing, because surely that is the only explanation for this. You almost skip your most recent entry, until you glimpse,

_-and so shall it be, ‘till the dusking of the final day and our-_

You stare, uncomprehending. You had _just written_ about your mother’s smothering housewife schtick. What the hell is happening? Staring at the book, you finally notice that what fills the page is recognizable to you, but no shorthand you’ve ever seen or written. Dark, coiling runes glare up from the page and glisten as if still wet, as if below their dark surface lies something more. And the more you stare, the deeper you want to go. You fling the book across the room and take refuge in an opposite corner, shamefully crawling into it and hugging your knees tight to your chest.

As you watch, the shadows seem to deepen again, but this time you take no comfort from them. No, they gather about that horrific book in the other corner, that invader, corrupter of your innermost thoughts. 

Now, now is when the fear begins.

\--

It’s late after a game at Sollux’s and Vriska and Ampora are arguing over the existence of magic. It’s entertaining enough but as it drags on, it becomes simply irritating. Eventually, you snap, “Well, why don’t you just find a spellbook and sort it out once and for all.”

You think that’s the end of it, but you should have known differently, as Vriska’s eyes light up.

\-- 

Weeks later, after you’ve fled your house with Kanaya following your mother walking in on the pair of you on the couch, the two of you get a text almost simultaneously.  
“heyyyyyyyy people! guess who's got a preeeeeeeetty gr8 spellbook to try out! 8pm, my place :::;D”

You exchange a look with Kanaya. 

“She can’t possibly...”

“Be serious? Oh, she is quite probably serious about attempting whatever nonsense is written in whatever tome she may have found even as she is unlikely to expect her “beliefs” to be substantiated.”  
“Ah. Well, a diverting evening, at the least.”

So it is at 8pm that you find yourself in comically overlarge robes beside Kanaya’s overly ostentatious Bram Stoker-esque costume. When Vriska answers the door, she makes a face.

“Where the hell are you two going, a LARP? Ugh. At least you two showed up.”

She goes back inside and leaves the door open for you. Entering the place, you find all the lights dimmed or off. 

“Who hasn’t?”

“Sollux and Terezi, the losers.”

The living room has been cleared, and Eridan has been put to work drawing some manner of decorative circle. Vriska shoves a book in your faces, open to a page with what looks like the completed circle.

“C’mon, let’s get drawing already. I wanna try this!”

You take the book from her and begin to read what it is this is supposed to accomplish. The book purports that such a symbol, plus a few stanzas of script spoken aloud will summon a spirit to answer questions. You eye the text uneasily, flashing back to your own dubious experiences, which always seemed strangely distant once they were past. Were they not so recurring, you would doubt their existence. At the very least, they do not seem to crop up in groups, so you lend a hand, copying out the bizarre symbols from the book with care in the proper areas of the circle. When it’s all done, Vriska goes around and lights a series of black candles. The smell of the wax is putrid and you have no desire to know what they are made of. 

“Okay, so we’re supposed to recite this crap three times while standing around the circle. Let’s practice it a couple of times so we don’t fuck it up. I want to be sure nothing happens because _magic isn’t real_ rather than one of us screwed up.”

“Pssht, whatever Eridan. I know _I’m_ going to get it right the first time.” But Vriska relents and you all memorize the stanzas until you’re confident you can rattle them off without a mistake.

Standing about the circle, the four of you begin the strange little chant, invoking a messenger to make itself known. You had to correct their pronunciation during practice, and both you and they had to wonder how you know how to pronounce “Nrub'yiglith.”

As it proceeds, the air seems to get heavier. The rational part of your mind wants to tell you that it’s a side effect of the setting and the droning chant, that you all are fooling yourselves into believing something is happening. Candles gutter, then flare back to life twice as bright, and eyes flick towards them. Fear, anticipation and disbelief is patterned on your friends faces in equal amounts as they churn out the incantation. The rational part of your mind is struggling to think, rather than react. 

But a rather darker place of your mind is reacting. As the air takes on a thick, oppressive feel something wants to crawl desperately into your forebrain, to stop this, to protect...you? Itself? Panic that is not yours wells up in that dark place, and even as you continue the chant, you have to hold back something else from spilling out of your throat.

Unconsciously, it seems that you four are raising your voices for the the final repetition as the air seems to congeal and

_\- a flash of brilliant white, the screaming of a bodiless mouths with indeterminable voices, a million, billion twisted minds consigned to oblivion -_

your control slips for a moment and something icy cold wrests control of your mind away from you and thinks _**No.**_   
Ah, angels and horrorterrors, already squabbling over a soul so small.  
But whispers, through your chanting, like a second voice, “Aphtaghn.”

The air seems to pop in time with something in the back of your throat and you clamp your jaws shut and try to constrict your throat simultaneously. Vriska and Eridan immediately start arguing about what happened while you carefully try to find a chair and sit down and think about not spewing alien fluid or gibbering in languages you do not know.

Kanaya touches your shoulder. “Rose, are you quite alright?”

Through gritted teeth and barely moving lips, you manage “No, I do not believe so. I would like to go home, I feel ill.”

Vriska and Eridan hold off on their argument for a moment to stare at you as you rise and leave the room. Then Vriska turns back to Eridan and starts arguing again. But Eridan’s eyes stay on you, dammit. He starts as the faintest dribble of black escapes your lips and then you’re out of the room. You make it out of the front door before hurling a gob of black into the hedges beside it. It hisses as it hits the leaves. You brace yourself for more, but it appears that this time, that will be it. As you hear Kanaya come up behind you, you wipe your mouth hastily on the sleeve of your cloak before trying to swallow the last of the filth in your mouth. It nearly makes you gag, but you suck hard at your teeth to clear them of the black.

“Rose, what’s-?”

“I believe that-” you begin and oh no, you feel another roil from within you and this time that cold pressing feeling in your head again. You grit your teeth and try again. “I believe those foul candles have turned my stomach. I’m sure I’ll be better in the morning.”

You usually are, at least. 

Kanaya offers to walk you home, but you refuse as politely as you can and stalk off into the night, buttoning down on the alien intrusions. You would rather not have her see you like this.

\--

You break it off with Kanaya shortly after you convulse in her arms and nearly vomit into her mouth.

With her gone, you lose all at once the suspicion with which Eridan views you, the risk of harming a loved one and your last desperate tie to society. 

Well. Nearly.

It’s your final year of high school.

\--

Your graduation is something else. As you rise from the crowd to accept your diploma as valedictorian, you shiver at the ice in your veins. Your make-up now serves not only to make you as pale as possible but also to cover up the encroaching veins of black ichor spreading through your body. You can feel them sometimes, needle-like tendrils snaking and pricking through your still-warm flesh like hungry parasites. 

Your corruption accelerated once you abandoned Kanaya, as if you really did let go of some part of humanity that day. You almost never spew forth the black bile anymore, but it seems to have come up with some new means of imposing itself on reality through your very flesh. You haven’t been seen in public anything less than fully covered in months. While your physical attachments to the world have almost been severed, your intellectual ones remain. On the cusp of being finished is your first novel.

You accept the diploma with some grace, but even as you move to give your speech, you realize that you are about to suffer another bout of the bile. Typical. For a moment, you consider giving the speech as the fluid drips down your chin to the horror of your assembled peers. It is not like you have to deal with them any longer. But the acidic mass doesn’t seem to want to try to force its way out of your throat this time. This time the cold of your veins suddenly gives way to an almost orgasmic warmth as the pulse of your heart is allowed to take over for just another moment. 

Then that moment is over as the acidic burning licks its way through your veins and your eyes water at the sudden, unfamiliar pain. Your stomach is clenched and you wish for a moment to hurl this corruption from your throat, but you are denied even that. As a terrible intelligence rears itself in your head, you realize that your human concepts of reproduction have doomed you. You thought that the lack of some manner of pregnancy sign meant you were safe for the foreseeable future.

With a small cry, you fling yourself from the stage and flee the room, even as voices that you should not understand command you to

_\- baptise them in the ichor of their new gods, their gift bringing forth the Noble Circle From Beyond, heralding an eternal twilight for humanity as their forms warp and twist into ones more pleasing to the horrorterrors -_

kill them all.

Your name is Rose Lalonde and something has been growing inside you. But it does not want to be birthed by you. 

It wants to become you.

\--

It’s miles and miles to your house and you spend them in pain and transformation. The black of your veins spreads and dulls to a corpse-like grey until only the paleness of your face gives any hint of tepid life. Stumbling through the forest between your house and your school, the underbrush tears away at your graduation gown even as the voices tear out your mind. 

You think you cry out as a tendril of acid bursts from your back into something that whips about, and spawns eyes that you can suddenly see from. The disorientation slams you into a tree, its rough bark tearing at your face. The tentacle whips around it and rips it from the earth as if in punishment. Your hand comes away from your cheek dripping black and red that you see from half a dozen new eyes. You weep, until you realize that your tears taste of more than salt, but brine and rotting things inside. So you suck down your sobs, rub viciously at your eyes and throw your pain back in their faces. You will not give them the satisfaction of your grief, even as you stalk the woods in pain.

More of your flesh is mutated, your jaw distending into a multi-hinged monstrosity. _I could bite off a child’s head, swallow it whole,_ some part of you thinks. Another thinks, _Lovecraft was nothing like this._ And, _the only thing I want to swallow right now is my pride_.

And then you’re clear of the woods, stumbling, shambling into a clearing with a stark white house in it. It is your home, with observatory and lab attached. It is where you mother is, likely collapsed on the couch from drink. You considered it a small coup, once upon a time, when you convinced her that graduation was tomorrow, on a Friday of course. Now you think of it as a mad coincidence, your last hope to escape this nightmare of the flesh. 

You make your dripping way to the house, even as your bowels leak from you, burst from your stomach in an eruption of intestines-turned tentacles. The explosive pain of it brings you to your knees. One curls about you and gently strokes your cheek, even as icy whispers coax you into releasing your hold on 

_\- this vessel, our gateway into this world. Let us be born, let us rule through you and you will be enthroned in dark splendour for all eternity in the Furthest Ring -_

your body. The charnal reek of it, of you, causes you to expel the contents of your stomach and something approximating your breakfast splatters on the grass below you. It is obscene that you find that comforting.

With great effort and many tears, you haul yourself upright and shamble towards the house. Your shoe rips as your foot splits in two, grows more toes that suddenly warp into suckered pseudopods. It’s little more than an ache, and that is worrisome. 

Ten feet, five, then you crash through the french windows of the first floor living room. The bright lights of overhead halogens and the TV throw your mutated carcass into hideous contrast. It seems to steam with a dark miasma, as if the purity of the light were burning your corruption away.

You are brought crashing back to reality with a high-pitched scream that signals that your mother has come to her senses. She scrambles backwards, over the couch, her still-beautiful face a rictus of horror and disgust. You want nothing more than to cry for her, cry “Mommy,” “Mom” or some other diminutive, but that idiotic pride, that showmanship, rears it’s head again.

“Hello, Mothegxbz. Oh goddalyvvywg, not my dalxxyz heggrigd too. I don’t suplymothithsys you gxxzzbz help me?”

Her only reply is another shriek as she flees. Well. You suppose you deserve that. You fall to your knees, or what you’re sure will be some kind of tentacle shortly and wonder, why you’ve been such an ass to your mother, why you never confided in her, why you thought this was some sort of _blessing_. Even as tears of regret stream down your face, something around your rib-cage pops and your back splits into a blood eagle of black bile. Your screams, at least, remain yours and you fire one into the uncaring air before going slack. Your stare at the white ceiling, taking at least some refuge in something uncorrupted before one eye rolls uselessly into the back of your head.

From the cavity that used to be your chest, something amorphous, made of eyes and teeth slithers, crawls out to wrap around you like some foul cocoon. The whispers return, and gently impart that this form will be consumed to make way for the first of the gateways and-

“Get the hell out of my daughter, freak-thing!” 

Your mother stands in the doorway leading to her lab, some haphazard contraption in her hands. All dozens of your eyes snap and lock on to her. They rove independently over her and the device in her hands. You feel an alien uncertainty before panic and realizing the device has a trigger. With a pull, a wave of force and energy cascades forth and blasts you, shredding the remains of your gown. Your world disintegrates into white pain and you scream in two voices.

Over the cacophony of voices in your head

_\- the white choir burns! damn the voices of the angels nononononono this world is ours and we will not be banished agai -_

you can hear your mother scream back, “An’ when you get back to your undeterminateable but empir, em, scientifically determined point of origin, tell ‘em Roxy Lalonde sent you!”

The feeling is a pain apart, but you embrace it with glee. You feel as if the presence of the corruption, the so-called Noble Circle, is being burned, stripped from your flesh. Your sight diminishes as your many eyes pop and evaporate. With every new darkness, you grin more widely and come to love your mother a little more even as she burns you to what feels like a crisp. 

The ice in your mind is melting, retreating back and your so-limited sight sees your flesh pale pink again. But as the icy dark retreats, is pushed out of your corporeal form, you feel hooks in your mind, your soul and hear the hissing whispers of vengeance and wroth.

Then your rib cage snaps back into place as if there was never a sacrifice to things best left forgotten in your space. When your bare, pure form slumps to the floor, you no longer inhabit it.


	3. Storytime

She is empty. The doctors tell you what you already know, that there is no evidence of brain activity, though otherwise she seems perfectly healthy. She is in a coma, her eyes staring at nothing. And it is your fault. You were a terrible mother, a terrible scientist and a worse saviour.

When the authorities finally came around to asking questions, you fielded them with tears you didn’t need to fake even as you spun a horseshit story about seizures, collapses and long-term care. She lives with you now, your lab converted to a small clinic devoted to her rehabilitation. You spend much of your time at her side, reading to her. Once you worked up the nerve to walk into her room, it was not difficult to figure out that the stacks of books in her room were arranged into “read” and “unread.” And so you help her get through her backlog. 

It is during your forays into Rose’s room that you find a few things of note. The first is your lost copy of Lovecraft, which gets a small laugh from you. The second is her journal. You hesitate, of course, at the idea of invading Rose’s privacy, but you’re just so desperate to hear, see, even the most distant sense of her. You open it, and nearly drop the thing. Whatever is written in there, you can’t read, and you’re pretty sure should not even be read. Your eyes flicker to Lovecraft and remember the stories of Abdul Alhazred. 

The last thing was her laptop. It was a fairly recent purchase, given her preference for ink and writing. And once you open it and bypass the login, you find it’s pretty sparse. A few essays, a folder you only go into once, and several documents under the heading _Complacency of the Learned._ You open one and start reading.

It’s several hours later when you finally look up. You pack up the laptop, take a new book from the unread stack and make your way down to the lab. 

“Heya, Rosie. Sorry, but I’ve been a real jerkass and going through your things.” You pull up the chair. “Don’t worry, I left the porn alone, lol.

“But, uh, I found _Complacency_. And well, I really, really fuckin’ like it, you know? You’re real wordy, but I love it and I can’t wait to read more.”

You sniff a bit and dry your eyes. “I know I wasn’t the best mom... ok I was pretty shit. But I miss you so much Rosie and reading this is like oh goddammit Roxy stop crying!”

Eventually you manage to start reading to her again. After dinner, spoon fed to her and hastily shovelled into your face, you read more of the _Complacency._

\--

It’s before you realize that the fucking tomes that are her novels aren’t complete that you realize that the whole thing is allegory. When you realize that these things were meant to warn people of the horrifying things that happened to her, of things beyond the fabric of space, you pretty well lose it.  
Oh, it's not like there is anything you could do about it.  
You were supposed to be her _mother_! You were supposed to do the saving, the warning, not her! Instead you got tanked on a nightly basis, lost yourself in work that no one gives a shit about except like, .5% of academia and basically acted like a goddamn tool.

You nearly hurl the laptop at the wall, but it’s your last link to your Rosie. So instead you take all your booze into the garage and hurl it at the wall, screaming with every bottle, sobbing with every shatter. Eventually you run out of proxies for your hate and you sink to your knees in the pooling alcohol. _Too little, too late, drunkie._

\--

Following Rose’s “collapse,” your colleagues were more than understanding about you taking a sabbatical of indeterminate time. But you think it is time that the sabbatical ended and that you get back to work. That... creature came from somewhere and you intend to find out exactly where. So you open Rose’s journal and get to work deciphering the script.


	4. Praise for Complacency of the Learned

“A tour-de-force of dark fiction! Young adult or mature reader, this hit is sure to keep you up at night for months to come!”  
 _\- The New York Times_

“Sure to expand your vocabulary and your mind.”  
 _-The Guardian_

“A terrifying example of the depths that a human mind can delve to and what can be dredged up there.”  
 _\- io9.com_

“Yo, Lalonde, get me back about the movie already.”  
 _\- Dave Strider_

“The best example of dark fiction this year, probably this decade. Rose Lalonde spins a tale that keeps you enthralled no matter the length.”  
 _\- SF &F review_

“Delightfully dark, if a bit wordy.”  
 _\- Neil Gaiman_

“-but it is when you consider all the parallels between what happened in the recent past and the events in these books that a little tingle of fear disassociated with the book itself runs down your spine. It is almost as if the author is trying to tell us something.”  
 _-grimAuxiliatrix, goodreads.com_

 

 

RL will return.

**Author's Note:**

> I shamelessly took inspiratiom from these two posts on tumblr and have used their ideas with their permission!
> 
> http://sermna.tumblr.com/post/46965361435/morningthief-sermna-rose-who-lives-on-the
> 
> http://morningthief.tumblr.com/post/46940838595/sermna-rose-who-lives-on-the-barest-of-means
> 
> Thank you for reading this mess. It taught me a lot about what I am capable of writing and what I'm not. Talk about a learning experience.


End file.
